In acoustic environments, it is natural for a normal listener to focus on one talker while monitoring other acoustic sources. An example hereof is other talkers in a cocktail party setting or other complex acoustic environments. In this regard, the acoustic filtering due to the head shadow effect and the binaural neural interaction plays an important part to enhance the speech of the focused talker while suppressing other interference. Moreover, the brain also forms another sound image from two ears to monitor the other acoustic sources, which are suppressed by the binaural beamforming effects.
US 2015/0289065 A1 relates to a binaural hearing assistance system comprising binaural noise reduction. The user can input the location of the target sound source, e.g. with a remote control or cellular phone, and a noise reduction system operates based on the inputted location.
When people wear hearing aids, the signals from the acoustic sources are spatially filtered by an extra stage, i.e. hearing aids, especially when the hearing aids apply higher order beamforming technologies to enhance the directivities.